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to Oxford and gained his degree but unlike Peele, Greene or Nashe he did not make his way straight to London but entered the service of Sir Robert Sadler and served him as a soldier in the Low Countries. Such close contact with real life and the horrors of war might well account for his more sober outlook on life. Thomas Kyd, born in 1558, had no distance to travel to reach his final destination for he was born in the City and baptised on 6 November, just eleven days before Queen Elizabeth came to the throne. His father, Francis Kyd, was also a scrivener, writer of the Court letter of London and a Freeman of the Company of Scriveners, his mother Joan the legatee of a publisher. At the age of seven he was sent to the Merchant Taylors’ School where the headmaster, Dr Richard Mulcaster, was a formidable scholar with a real interest in drama, so the young Thomas learned French, Italian and Spanish as well as the more usual Greek and Latin and must have been introduced to a variety of plays; but although Merchant Taylors had forty-three scholarship places reserved for bright boys at St John’s College, Oxford, Kyd never went up to university. As a result of this he was unfairly looked down on by his more snobbish contemporaries, even though the profession of a scrivener and copyist at a time when most of the populace was illiterate was not only essential but highly respected. Both Greene and Nashe made snide comments about Kyd, although it could just be that jealousy also entered into it for Kyd’s
The Spanish Tragedy
was the single most popular and successful play of its day, remaining in repertoire for thirty years after his death.
    But soon it was clear that there were two dramatists who stood out well above the rest. In 1564, within a few weeks of each other, the young wives of two craftsmen each gave birth to a healthy son. Although one lived in Kent and the other in Warwickshire the two families had much in common. In both cases the father had been apprenticed in leatherwork, one then specialising in shoemaking, the other in glove-making and tanning. Both men, at the time of the birth of their eldest sons, were in comfortable circumstances although each would later run into debt, due in no small part to their predilection for litigation.
    Katherine Marlowe’s child was born at the very beginning of February but, as is usually the case, there is no exact birth date as it was not until the nineteenth century that births had to be officially registered. The only record of the birth of a child was when it was baptised and its baptism recorded in the Parish Register, known popularly as ‘the Church Book’. As baptism was considered essential for eternal life and infant mortality was extremely high, the ceremony usually took place as soon as was practicable, generally about three days after birth. Indeed the Book of Common Prayer bade parents not to postpone christening their child beyond the first Sunday or Holy Day after its birth. Katherine’s son, given the name of Christopher after his paternal grandfather, was duly baptised at the Church of St George the Martyr on 6 February. That the baby was safely delivered must have been a considerable relief as her first child, Mary, had died almost immediately after birth.
    The Marlowes were established Canterbury craftsmen and Katherine’s husband, John, was the third generation to go into the family business, while the grandfather, Christopher, was considered a ‘warm man’, with a substantial town house in the city and a further property in the Kent countryside consisting of a meadow and twenty acres of grazing rights. John had married Katherine Urry, a Dover girl, on 22 May 1560 at the church where her children would later be baptised. Their home was a fine one in the main street, renowned in its day for carved panelling of such beauty that it attracted a great deal of local envy. It stood on the corner of St George’s Street and Little George’s Lane but both it and